A monster — or a sad dad?

THIS gripping French-language film does not exactly cover original ground. Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Miriam (Lea Drucker) are a divorced couple wrangling over custody of their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria).

Xavier Legrand’s film begins, prosaically but powerfully, with them sitting before a divorce-court judge. Miriam can’t back up her insistence that Antoine is an abusive bully.

The judge duly rules that the boy’s father must have regular access. From there, the film builds into a slow-burning thriller, while at the same time offering an intense and superbly observed study of a man in emotional freefall — and a family paying the price.

Antoine is not a monster, just a wreck of a man.

His scenes with Julien are riveting, heart-rending, and I dare say horribly accurate: a father prevented from loving and cherishing his child by his own pathetic, debilitating self-pity.